Today Bastet has told us about the shadorma: where it comes from, its form and content. It’s believed to have come from Spain as a European alternative to the Japanese haiku. It is similar to a haiku in the sense that it is brief: a 6 line poem with a syllable count of 3 – 5 – 3 – 3 – 7 – 5. There are also variations on the form, such as the Shadorma Summation, a poem with a shadorma that rounds it up; chained or linked shadorma; and shadorma to end a piece of prose, similar to the haibun.

Recently, one of the contributors at MLMM commented that she usually only writes a one line shadorma instead of a multi stanza shadorma: as we think of the shadorma as being a Spanish variation of the haiku, this would be the logical way to write the poem, trying to convey meaning in six lines without elaborating into several stanzas.

Bastet has asked us to create shadorma following the rules of the classical haiku (with the shadorma structure, of course!) and the kigo ‘autumn colours’.